We watched part of the Chelsea/Manchester United game at a local pub (they tied, it seemed everyone was interested in this game, which was billed as one of the biggest soccer, er, football games since the World Cup), while sampling Australian beers, and he told me that his Google ads are bringing in a really good addition to his income (he runs a Web design firm in Newport, Wales).

Gale was wearing a shirt from Threadless, which impressed Maryam (they are having a sale right now and have a bunch of different shirt designs).

We’re visiting Maryam’s family here in Wales. Her brother’s son, last night, said “I’ll Google that” at one point during the conversation. He also was bugging Maryam’s brother for not having wifi (I’m hooked up to you via an ethernet cable, so “old school”). And people bug me for not getting away from technology. Hey, I traveled 5300 miles to, um, have a geek talk. I remember when Alan Cooper, back in the mid 1990s, told me Silicon Valley is not a place anymore, “it’s a state of mind,” he’d say. I now understand.

One thing wrong with Chris Sells blog? I can’t find the RSS feed there and neither can Google Reader (which works remarkably well at finding feeds on most blogs).

Chris, that’s just lame for someone who is a developer, particularly one that is hip and using Vista (it has an RSS reader built in). It’s time for you to get a big feed icon and hook it up to your RSS feed.

Can someone go over to building 42, find Sells, and slap him upside the head?

Google Reader tip: I added a “subscribe” button to my toolbar. Here’s how you do that:

1) Open Google Reader (I do that by typing http://reader.google.com ).
2) Click “Settings” at the top of Reader’s page.
3) Click the Reader’s “Goodies” tab.
4) Drag the “Subscribe” link to your toolbar.

Unfortunately I can’t get that to work with IE 7, just with Firefox.

UPDATE: I’ve noticed that the subscribe button doesn’t work consistently, but using the RSS icon in Firefox to subscribe to feeds does.

On Thanksgiving the hit of the day (other than our two turkeys) was our photos that were playing on our HD screen — Maryam’s mom watched them for hours. They were coming off of a Vista machine located in my office upstairs. The photos were streaming through my Xbox. Everyone commented that they thought that was mondo cool.

It’s something that you can only do with the Xbox and Vista’s version of Media Center is much better than the one you can buy with XP.

After playing with Vista, I think it’s underrated. I have a new Voodoo box that AMD is loaning me. It sits next to PodTech’s MacPro — both playing on my 30-inch Apple monitor.

Ryan Stewart notices something that I notice too. Outside of the tech world there isn’t the hatred of Microsoft that exists on some blogs. Normal people don’t care that Vista was two years late. They aren’t like Chris Pirillo and won’t notice that some of the UI isn’t consistent.

They’ll just see the photos on their friend’s Xbox and say “I want that.”

Chris Sells might be biased (he works at Microsoft) but he’s right. Vista rocks and is way underrated.

UPDATE: although it does have its problems. Joel Spolsky has been talking about the start menu and shutting down functionality, which prompted Moishe Lettvin to write about his experiences as a developer on the team that implemented that feature. That matches my experiences too. Microsoft has too many committees. They suck the life out of everything (which is why I made fun of the sound — that’s a metaphor for a lot of what’s wrong at Microsoft lately).